The decline, fall and return of the red wolf

Pilgrims from England landed on the coast of present-day Massachusetts in 1620 to carve a settlement from a vast and forbidding wilderness. Living cheek by jowl with North America’s wolves, settlers quickly came to fear and loathe these formidable predators, which competed for deer and preyed on livestock. Spurred on by tales of werewolves terrorising the towns and villages of Europe, the Pilgrims and those who came after them set about wiping wolves from the face of the continent. In 1630, their young colony became the first to offer a bounty for every wolf killed. Nearly four centuries later, conservationists are trying to rescue red and eastern wolves from oblivion.

IN THE centuries before Europeans arrived in North America, the wolf was a source of awe and a powerful symbol to the people who lived there. Like them, it was an accomplished hunter that fed its family and defended it against harm. Many tribes maintained it was the wolf that originally taught them to hunt. The Kwakiutl in present-day British Columbia identified so closely with wolves that they believed they were once wolves themselves. In Cherokee lore, the wolf was a close companion of Kana’ti, the first man.

European settlers newly arrived in the wilds of North America had a very different view of this top predator. Weaned on terrifying tales of killer wolves from the likes of Aesop and the brothers Grimm, they immediately set to work exterminating them, and very nearly succeeded in the case of red and eastern wolves.

The settlers’ fear of wolves seemed almost hard-wired, as anyone who has ever heard a wolf howl in a dark …